Hero Hunter: Izuku Yagi [opm x mha]

Bonus Chapter

Planet Nireh, unknown sector

The sky was red when they arrived.

Not the soft red of our twin suns during summer dusk, but a sickened, burning crimson. Like the sky itself had been wounded.

I remember the color first.
Then the silence.
Then the screams.

I was just a boy then—barely old enough to carry water for my mother, let alone understand war. But everyone in my village looked up that day. And we knew. Even the elders, who had lived through firestorms and plague-seasons, fell to their knees without a word.

They came as beams of light.
They stepped from the sky like it was a doorway.
There were four at first.

One wore no armor. Only chains made of something that burned blue, wrapped around its limbs like serpents. It floated, always... never walking. Another came cloaked in feathers made of molten gold—its wings silent, its face never shown. The third laughed. Constantly. Its mouth split far too wide, and when it smiled, the ground cracked.

The last was silent. A shadow of a person—neither man nor woman, moving in slow, deliberate patterns like it was following a dance only it could hear.

They didn't speak. Not in our tongue. Not even to each other.

We called them Avatars. Because nothing that beautiful... nothing that perfect... could be real.

But they were.

And they wanted everything.

They took the capital first—burned it without fire. People floated, screaming, until their blood turned to glass. Our weapons—plasma cannons, magnetic fields, kinetic barriers—they bent around them like wind through reeds. They didn't fight us. They demonstrated.

We surrendered after the first hour.

We thought they'd spare us. That they'd take what they wanted and leave.

We were wrong.

They didn't want gold. Or fuel. Or territory.

They wanted worship. And if you didn't bow, they remade you into something that did.

My father... he refused. He was strong. A former soldier. They didn't kill him. They just... touched his forehead.

And then he sang to them. A hymn none of us had ever heard. He knelt in the dirt, tears streaming down his face, still singing as they branded him with their mark.

That was twenty years ago.

Now, we are all worshipers. Or corpses. Or worse.

I paint this story on the walls of this cave, in blood and dust, for no one. Because I do not believe anyone is left who will come.

But if someone... someday... finds this place—if the stars ever bring another soul here—

Let it be known:

We were not conquered by soldiers. We were converted by gods.

But not all of us believe they are gods.

There is an old tale, spoken only in the cold caves of the North, where no light touches the stone. A prophecy passed down by the dreamers—those cursed with visions they could never prove.

My grandmother was one of them. She used to wake screaming, clutching her chest, whispering of things she had never seen.

She said the Avatars were not the first. That they were only pieces—shattered remnants of a greater will, trying to stitch itself back together.

She said they were afraid.

Afraid of something buried.
Not on our world. Not in our system. But beyond.

She called it the "The Fist That Turned Against God." A being who walks where even the Avatars cannot follow. Not a god. Not a demon. Something in between. A force with no name, no shape, no master.

The prophecy says:

"When the sky cracks a second time,
When the crimson turns to ash,
A soul forged by both ruin and mercy
Shall rise from the buried world.
And the Avatars along with their creator
shall tremble."

She believed it would come from a world they hadn't touched yet. A forgotten place. A planet of noise and flame, with skies choked by clouds and cities that stretch like cancer.

She died before the Avatars arrived.
They called her mad. Burned her bones as warning.

But I remember.

I remember every word.

And now, in the dark, when the stars are quiet and I can still hear the wind where no wind should be...

I pray she was right.